Zuckerberg bets on Kunal Shah for WhatsApp’s aggressive financial services, AI push

Mark Zuckerberg’s move to hire Kunal Shah to head WhatsApp is a clear statement of intent — the Meta boss wants the dominant messaging service to lead an aggressive push into financial services and catalyse his ambitious bet on artificial intelligence, driving the platform’s next growth phase a decade after being acquired by the Facebook parent.

Shah’s elevation comes as WhatsApp evolves into an AI distribution channel, with big shifts in its monetisation model. Key elements include AI agents for businesses and the Meta AI chatbot for consumers — all of which will be instrumental in Zuckerberg’s pursuit of what he calls personal superintelligence.

With over half-a-billion Meta platform users, India is uniquely positioned to make the agents ubiquitous, Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer at Meta Platforms Inc and leader of its Superintelligence Labs, told ET recently.


The Cred founder’s appointment could revive WhatsApp's fintech ambitions in India that lost momentum after former country head Abhijit Bose exited in 2022, executives said.

Shah’s appointment —he takes over from Will Cathcart — signals that India is not just its largest market with over 850 million users, but an increasingly influential hub for shaping the platform's global strategy outside Silicon Valley. WhatsApp went live with payments in India in 2020, but hasn’t seen much traction.

National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) data show it’s at 150 million monthly Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions, out of a total 23 billion. Cred, with a smaller user base, reported around 157 million transactions in May.

“Consumers use the messaging app to initiate the flow but close the transaction on one of the more popular UPI apps,” said the founder of a rival payments firm. “Shah’s deep understanding of Indian payments might help them change that.”

Bose, who cofounded digital payments startup Ezetap and left it to head WhatsApp in India, had laid out an elaborate plan to leverage payments as well as build insurance and pension products distribution through the platform in 2020. It had also tied up with Jio Mart at around the same time to enable digital commerce through the platform. These didn’t lead to a spurt in adoption.

“Since India is WhatsApp’s largest user base and Meta has hired an Indian entrepreneur to lead the business, there will definitely be a plan to push the subscription businesses on the platform aided by fintech services,” said an executive.

Others pointed out that WhatsApp has already integrated payments deep into the app. Added to that, Shah built one of India’s early mobile wallets businesses, Freecharge, following it up with a robust payments system built on Cred.

“His deep understanding of Indian consumers and Indian financial needs will hold him in a good stead as WhatsApp will try to take a fresh stab at the global fintech opportunity,” said the second person cited above.

WhatsApp is preparing for its biggest platform shift — transitioning from phone numbers to usernames and unique IDs this year, ET reported in March. The platform also plans to introduce dynamic pricing for businesses — they will need to bid in real time to send marketing messages on WhatsApp. This Facebook ad model marks one of the biggest shifts for WhatsApp since it began monetising enterprise messaging nearly a decade ago. These are among many changes that WhatsApp is making to revamp its business processes.

The platform overhaul is mainly targeted at unlocking ad-based revenues and preparing it for AI-driven interactions, allowing businesses and AI agents to communicate with users through the chat interface. Given that context, Shah is a product thinker who ticks all the right boxes, experts said.

India has also emerged as the largest user base of the Meta AI chatbot on WhatsApp that’s seen a record number of conversations globally after the launch of the tech company’s new frontier AI model, Muse Spark, Cathcart had told ET recently.